As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many information handling systems, particularly servers, possess Management Controllers (MCs). MCs (e.g., baseboard management controllers (BMC) or chassis management controllers (CMCs)) typically interface between system management software and platform hardware to manage data collected from various sensors on the server. These sensors include but are not limited those that detect temperature, fan speeds, and operating system status. MCs can monitor these sensors and alert the system administrator of any irregularities via a network. MCs may regularly access shared storage volumes to perform various actions such as booting from the storage volume, updating firmware and the like.
Currently, shared storage volumes either reside outside the chassis of the server or on MCs themselves and are private to each MC. The arrangement of these storage volumes in this manner may cause inefficiencies in server management. In particular, some MCs may be regularly replaced and are also subject to failover. In these situations, the data on the MCs' storage volumes must somehow be saved or copied to a new location or risk being lost or otherwise inaccessible. Thus, system administrators may have to manually ensure the same data exists across multiple MC storage volumes as a safeguard or develop real-time mirroring algorithms, which burden the MC from performing other tasks.
Additionally, current physical manifestations of the storage volumes and/or media (e.g., FLASH-based management-owned persistent storage) can result in slow write and erase access, thus creating bottlenecks in systems such as modular servers. As the operations in server management become more complex, storage volumes have found it difficult to keep pace in size. Furthermore, they can also wear out over time, which can require removing the MC to access the media versus having direct external access to replace the media. Also, in traditional virtual media, the MC may emulate a Universal Serial Bus (USB) composite mass storage device to a host device, and current implementations can require up to five concurrent storage devices to be emulated. With these implementations, removal of one of the storage devices may disrupt the usage of the remaining storage devices.
Therefore, there is a need for apparatus, systems and methods for adding internal network attached storage (NAS) that the MCs can share and access for their own use and that can scale with current storage demands.